Young adults are finding they've got a better shot at true romance online
Story by Jonas Allen
Illustrations by Cassie Keller
 

Sampson, whose father is a veterinarian, e-mailed some advice for the canine's halitosis and invited Frank Corey, Dakota's owner, to reply. What started as electronic chitchat in February 1997 developed into e-mails about their professional aspirations and long-term goals. They decided to try to meet in person someday.

Since point-and-click Web browsers first appeared in 1991, online dating services have changed the way some young adults look for love. Aided by the release of the film You've Got Mail, Internet dating has hit mainstream status. Match.Com, the site that introduced Sampson and Corey, has 100,000 active users--39 percent of whom are in their 20s. In addition, America Online handles more than 125,000 personal ads year round, 43,000 of which come from people between the ages of 18 and 25. Elsewhere on the Web, sites such as College Connection Matchmaker, CyberSingles, and Romance Online join hundreds of other services dedicated to online dating. However, Dr. Ava Rosenblum, a sociologist from Eugene, Oregon, who conducted a two-year study of Internet relationships, says years of negative publicity have created a stigma about online dating.

 Michelle Sampson walked into her dorm's computer room and turned one of the six computer monitors from her friends' view. With her 5'10" frame hunched over to obscure the screen, the University of Michigan graduate student got online and quietly typed the address of a Web site no one knew she visited. Sampson, 28, couldn't believe she was finishing school and still single. Now she was headed to Boston for work and had no idea how to meet Mr. Right in a new city. She decided to secretly surf a nationwide Internet dating site. Within days, she found her chance at romance: "28-year-old male likes to spend time with his golden retriever, Dakota. My dog's a good listener, but a horrible conversationalist. Not to mention he has very bad breath."
Art Aron, a psychologist from State University of New York at Stony Brook who has studied relationships for nearly 30 years, says students are reluctant to tell others about dating online because it involves a conscious search for love. "People don't want to feel like a relationship was arranged," he says. "They want to feel like it just happened."

But Sampson was frustrated because school and two jobs took so much of her time that love couldn't just happen. She also wanted to avoid realizing too late that a relationship she was involved in was not going to work out. That had happened before with a "traditional" romance.

During her freshman year, Sampson developed a crush on someone in a science class. Soon they started dating. All was well. Then her boyfriend began isolating her from others. He wanted to know where she was at all times. Then he cheated on her. But Sampson was a freshman, far from home and on her own for the first time. She was sure he really loved her. Then he broke off the relationship.

Yet when Sampson told her family in rural Pennsylvania about her promising online romance with Corey, she got a predictable response. "They said, 'Are you crazy? He could be an ax murderer!'" she recalls. "And I just said to them, 'So what? You could meet an ax murderer at a bar, too.'"

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